I thought it might be time to switch away from Ebola and catch up with other disease problems that continue to occur in the world. (If you miss Ebolanoia, though, I’m still collecting instances at my Tumblr. The latest: Indian authorities have force-quarantined in an airport a man who returned from West Africa with a clean bill of health and negative blood tests. They say they will not allow him to leave until his semen tests negative for Ebolavirus. Yes, they are insisting on samples.)

So: How can healthcare workers contribute to slowing down antibiotic resistance? A healthcare nonprofit suggests they commit to buying an antibiotic-free turkey for Thanksgiving.

If it feels like the problem in one sphere, medicine, doesn’t have much to do with the other, agriculture, then you are the perfect target for this pledge. (Even if you don’t actually work in health care.)

My grandparents — children of Irish and Scottish immigrants, for whom calories per penny was a much more important food value than fine cuisine — had a little mnemonic for Thanksgiving. It went like this:

Turkey, tetrazzini, ptomaine.

Perhaps that requires a little explanation.

The turkey part should be self-evident. Tetrazzini — a cream-sauce casserole based on spaghetti, one of those early 20th-century dishes invented to honor Italian opera stars — was what they did the second day with the turkey leftovers. Ptomaine (the “p” is silent) was what they worried lay in wait for them on the third. A late 19th-century term that has passed out of use, it derived from the notion that poisonous compounds lurked in rotting food.

For people who grew up before the antibiotic era — and who learned to cook when refrigerators were literal ice chests that kept things cool at best — “food poisoning” was a reasonable fear, and a risk they refused to take. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, no matter how delicious it appeared, whatever remained of the turkey went into the trash.